Philter

Note

The main branch is currently for Philter 4.0.0 development. For 3.x, refer to the tags. The latest of which is 3.4.0.

Philter is an API-based application to identify and manipulate (redact, anonymize, and more) PII, PHI, and other sensitive information.

Philter is built upon the open source PII and PHI redaction engine Phileas. Philter provides an API on top of Phileas that allows for redaction and management of filtering policies.

Philter was released as open source under the Apache License, version 2.0, in July 2024 for version 2.6.0, but Philter dates back to 2019. See the Release Notes for a description of past versions.

For Philter's User Guide please see https://philterd.github.io/philter/.

Philter on the Cloud Marketplaces

Philter is available on the cloud marketplaces as a turnkey redaction solution. These cloud images are pre-configured and ready to be used immediately after launch.

• Philter on the AWS Marketplace
• Philter on the Google Cloud Marketplace
• Philter on the Azure Marketplace

Building and Running Philter

Philter is built and run with Java 25. It is built with Maven:

mvn clean install

mvn verify also writes a test coverage report to target/site/jacoco/index.html, covering the unit tests and the integration tests together.

Test application output (including expected error logs from failure-path tests) is saved to target/surefire-reports/*-output.txt for unit tests and target/failsafe-reports/*-output.txt for integration tests. Maven still prints test results, failures, and failure stack traces in the build output. To stream application logs to the console while debugging, add -Dmaven.test.redirectTestOutputToFile=false to your Maven command.

To run Philter:

./compose.sh
./compose.sh up

compose.sh passes its arguments through to docker compose, defaulting to build.

On its first run the script generates private credentials into .env and reuses them afterwards:

• PHILTER_ENCRYPTION_KEY encrypts sensitive data at rest. Keep it safe and use the same value across restarts and instances: Philter refuses to start without it, and data encrypted with it cannot be recovered if the key is lost or changed.
• PHILTER_BOOTSTRAP_API_KEY is seeded onto the admin user at first start so the API works without visiting the dashboard. Revoke it in the dashboard when you no longer need it.

The script also generates PHILTER_BOOTSTRAP_ADMIN_PASSWORD for the first dashboard login and MONGODB_PASSWORD for the database. It stores these in an owner-readable .env file.

To supply these yourself, put it in .env before the first run and the script keeps it.

Once the containers are running, submit text to Philter's API for redaction:

API_KEY=$(grep PHILTER_BOOTSTRAP_API_KEY .env | cut -d= -f2)

curl -k "https://localhost:8080/api/filter" --data "George Washington lives in 90210 and his SSN was 123-45-6789." -H "Content-type: text/plain" -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY"

You can also access the UI at https://localhost:8080. Sign in as admin using PHILTER_BOOTSTRAP_ADMIN_PASSWORD from .env; you are required to set a new password before you can use the dashboard.

Interactive API documentation (Swagger UI) is available at https://localhost:8080/swagger-ui/index.html.

Philter serves HTTPS using a self-signed certificate that it generates the first time it starts, so curl needs -k and your browser will warn before showing the UI. See TLS for how to install your own certificate, or how to serve plain HTTP when a load balancer terminates TLS in front of Philter.

Philter uses a built-in in-memory cache by default and can be configured to use a shared Valkey/Redis cache for distributed deployments. See Caching in the user documentation.

Docker Images

Released versions are published to Docker Hub as philterd/philter, tagged by version. There is no latest tag, so name the version you want:

docker pull philterd/philter:3.4.0

The docker-compose.yml in this repository builds the image from source instead, so it runs the code on your current branch.

License

As of Philter 2.6.0, Philter is licensed under the Apache License, version 2.0. Previous versions were under a proprietary license.

Copyright 2024-2026 Philterd, LLC. Copyright 2018-2023 Mountain Fog, Inc.